Craft 6 finally ships an approval workflow — and I checked it against Drupal's Content Moderation
I've written here before that the one thing missing from the Craft box was an approval workflow — Drupal ships Content Moderation in core, and Craft 5 just… didn't have an equivalent. As of the Craft 6 alpha, that gap is closing. Alpha.19 (1 Oct 2026) adds publishing workflows, "releases," and comments on the activity timeline. So I did the obvious thing for a Drupal hand: held it up against Workflows and Content Moderation to see whose model I'd rather explain to an editor.
What landed
From the 6.x changelog, alpha.19: "Added publishing workflows, which control when drafts may be applied to entries. Workflows are configured from Settings → Workflows and assigned to sections. (Craft Pro and Enterprise only.)" The mechanic is the important part: "Changes to enabled entries in sections with a workflow are now saved as drafts, which must be submitted for review and approved by each workflow stage before they can be applied." There's one built-in stage type, "User Review," supporting per-group approval requirements, carried-over approvals, change requests, and email notifications; a "Workflow" tab in the element pane for submitting and reviewing; and extension points (WorkflowStageInterface, a Workflows facade, WorkflowTransitioning/Transitioned/Commented events) for custom stages.
Two companions shipped alongside. Releases: "saved drafts of root elements to be grouped, scheduled, and published atomically," with a releaseId query param and GraphQL argument — think "stage twelve edits and publish them as one." And comments: Markdown on the activity timeline, with editing, structured user mentions and email notifications. Alpha.20 (7 Oct) already fixed a race condition where concurrent requests could invalidate the same workflow run — the kind of bug that tells you this is real, load-bearing code and also that it's an alpha.
Draft-centric vs state-centric
Here's the design difference I keep coming back to. Craft's model is draft-centric: editing an enabled entry forces your change into a draft, and that draft climbs approval stages before it applies. Drupal's is state-centric: core Workflows ("Provides an interface to create workflows with transitions between different states") plus Content Moderation attach arbitrary states and transitions to the entity itself, with a published revision staying live while a forward revision moves through review.
Neither is obviously better, and the honest field-note question is which one an editor finds less confusing. Craft's "your edit is now a draft awaiting approval" is arguably more intuitive than Drupal's "this entity is in the Needs Review state and there's a forward revision" — but I'm hedging that, because I know Drupal's editorial UX from years of use and I've only read Craft's from a changelog, not driven it. I genuinely couldn't find user docs: /docs/6.x/system/workflows, /docs/6.x/workflows and /docs/6.x/system/releases all 404. Everything above is reconstructed from the changelog and PR #19667, so treat it as "what the code says it does," not "what I watched it do."
Core eating a plugin category is the quiet story here. Verbb's Workflow plugin has filled this gap for years — it shipped 3.0.24 on 17 Oct, still for Craft 3/4/5, at $49 plus $15/year. If Craft 6 bakes workflows in, "wait for 6 or buy the plugin now" becomes a real client question, and nobody yet knows whether Verbb ships a 6 version or bows out.
The catch, and the timing
One catch worth flagging plainly: the changelog says Pro and Enterprise only, where Drupal's Workflows and Content Moderation are free core modules. I'll leave the paid-tier debate to one sentence — I've written about Craft's paid economy already — but it's a real difference when you're pricing a build.
The other is timing, and I want to state it carefully rather than as a gotcha. The September 2025 roadmap promised approval workflows, releases and commenting, and said to "expect to ship Craft 6 Beta in Q3 of 2026, with a GA release following in Q4." It's 20 October and we're on alpha.20. A newer, undated transition-planning page now says "near the end of 2026 or in first quarter of 2027." Those are two official statements that don't quite line up; the first beta date isn't announced. Read that as an alpha finding its feet, not a broken promise.
The takeaway
If the missing approval workflow was your reason to keep a Craft site on a plugin — or your reason to reach for Drupal on a governance-heavy build — Craft 6 is closing the distance, and the draft-centric design is a reasonable one. Just don't build a client's editorial process on an alpha whose feature has no docs yet. Stand it up somewhere disposable, run a real submit-review-approve loop, and see whether your editors find it clearer than states and transitions. That test, not the changelog, is the answer.